Gravitas
by Sunshine170
Summary: Layer after layer has cemented their relationship, deepened their connection and made it so much more than what any one label could wholly define. Tonight however he wishes he could peel back those layers a little, go back to whence they came from.
1. Chapter 1

Olivia Dunham has played many roles in Peter's life.

The annoying stranger who literally shackled his nomadic existence and dragged him reluctantly into a job he wasn't interested in and forced him into confronting a past he had long repressed.

The slave driving and at times infuriating colleague who had no qualms about showing up in the middle of the night at his hotel room if he let his phone off the hook to indulge in that human necessity known as rest.

The most impressive drinking buddy any man with an appreciation for whiskey could ask for.

A woman who seemed to have an uncanny ability to see him for more than what he was, who always seemed to expect more from him just with the way she looked at him, who, in what some may perceive as a serious error in judgment, seemed to place her trust in him.

She's been his partner and his friend, his confidante and his protector.

She was the love of his life, the mother of his child, his wife.

Layer after layer has cemented their relationship, deepened their connection and made it so much more than what any one label could wholly define.

Tonight he wishes he could peel back those layers a little, go back to whence they came from.

Back to a time when he didn't matter to her, when she didn't look at him with love in her eyes.

Or pain…

Back to when she would shake her head in mild reproach as a smile fought at the corner of her lips, when he launched on some witticism at a crime scene they were investigating which always reflected an undercurrent of how much he didn't want to be there.

That Peter Bishop may have never had a chance in hell with someone like her, but at least he could have been safe in the knowledge that he couldn't hurt her.

He could make her laugh, he could help her out… but he didn't have the ability to affect her.

Thank God for that, he thinks.

Because that Peter Bishop, the self-centered, rootless man who'd existed blissfully on the periphery of her consciousness had never been the one to let her down, to disappoint her.

It was the man he had become, the one who had so whole heartedly and joyfully embraced the mantle of family who had ended up being her persecutor instead.

He understood now why he had fought for so long against being tied down to people, putting down roots.

Because once you did that, and something comes along to untether you, to uproot you from the people you loved…it hurts like a bitch.

It turns you into somebody you can barely recognize when you looked in the mirror.

And he only sees it now. Sees the faded quality of his eyes, lacking that carefree twinkle that had graced them long ago, the gauntness of his face, the absence of a more prominent stubble.

The capriciousness that he once worn like a garb on his demeanor has slipped off, replaced by an acute gravitas, his broad shoulders that had once hoisted his daughter were now stooped by another invisible weight.

He doesn't see the man he once was, or even the man he came short of being.

He only sees the man who failed, in every which way a man could fail.

* * *

Everything in his life had always been about making the impossible possible. Hell, his very existence was an outlier. He was but an anomaly of flesh and blood who lived and breathed because twice in an interval of twenty six years, two people who had loved him very much had refused to let him go.

And yet after everything, after the scale and context of the things they'd dealt with in the past, all his experience at making sense of crazy and unprecedented situations amounted to nothing when confronted with the most grave crisis of his life.

And the price of his failure was in the brokenness of her being, the fractures in that beautiful family he had made with her.

She hadn't asked for much, just for him to be there and he hadn't even done that.

Every story needed a hero and a fallible protagonist. And he was the epitome of a fallible protagonist, just as much she was the embodiment of a true hero.

She had given him everything, a sense of purpose, a sense of home, of family.

She had given him the most precious little girl in the entire world…

Above all, she had given him her heart, completely.

And he couldn't hold onto a single one of those things.

She had held onto him through everything, through differing sets of memories to no memories of him.

Where he had seen only his weaknesses, she had seen his strengths and made them her own.

Even her idea of him was much stronger than who he was really.

Maybe it would have been better for everybody if he had simply stayed a figment of her imagination instead of morphing into an actual human being.

Because he hates this Peter Bishop. Hates him even more than that smart talking, resourceful and unscrupulous son of a bitch he used to be. He fucking hates him for being weak, for spiraling down a path of despair when he should have held her hand and walked with her.

It doesn't matter that for a few years he had something so beautiful and perfect and real, that if he closes his eyes, he can literally taste it.

The warmth of sunshine, the smell of grass, a dandelion in the breeze…

Because he had wrecked it with his own two hands. Watched it slowly crumble, not caring as his own misery numbed him to everything around him.

For years he had resented his father's tendency to develop tunnel-vision in moments of duress, to become consumed with the problem and never see the world that was crashing and burning outside of that.

And yet when the situation presented itself, he had done nothing differently. Had become obsessed with searching for his missing child and failed to see that she was hurting as much as him, perhaps more.

_Sometimes in life, the only choices we have left are bad ones…_

He had made a choice, chosen the slim chance of finding their daughter over going with her.

He left her alone…

Of all the years of riding shotgun with her, of watching out for her in corners of abandoned buildings, of chasing down suspects with her.

Even when she was more than capable of handling those situations by herself.

The one time she actually needed him; he had stood back and let her walk into danger without even a moment's hesitation.

He doesn't want to be that man_….her goddamn husband_, who had made that decision. He wants to be that stranger who had anxiously urged her to call for backup, who had ignored her advice to stay in the car and run after her after all of two days of knowing her.

Because that stranger may not have cared as much about her as he does, didn't love her the way he did with every fiber of his being, but at least he could never break her heart.

Tonight, he wants to go back to where they began, to assume different roles.

He'll be her partner again, like always. He'll be the man whom she could trust, if she'll deign to do that again, to have her back, who could make her maybe smile in the direst of situations.

If he could learn how to do that again, maybe someday he could be her everything else again too.


	2. Chapter 2

For a long time Olivia had known with certainty that she was the most important person in Peter's life.

But from the moment she saw him hold their daughter for the first time, she knew that had changed.

He'd taken one look at the bottomless blue eyes, the adorable chubby cheeks hued with a rosy tint, the wisps of golden hair, the perfection of her little arms and legs.

And just like that she knew she had been replaced.

It didn't bother her in the slightest. How could it when she felt the same way herself.

In those eyes that sparkled with mischief and innocence, bluer than the Cornish sea on a summer day lay a force field more potent than anything she had encountered.

It drew him in like a vortex, and he was powerless to resist its pull as was she.

She saw a man completely and utterly in love with his child, who would walk to the ends of earth and back for her, if she asked him to even in jest.

And with each day that passed, she saw him become ever so more enamored with her, with her smile and her laugh, her baby soft skin, the sound of her voice.

Her very existence was enough to make his lips turn in a grin.

The consummate daddy's little girl, their daughter had exploited her place in his heart to the hilt, making him yield to her every whim and fancy with but a wiggle of her little finger.

And he was so far wrapped around said finger that she should have worried that he had lost all sense of his self, except she found it much too endearing.

She barely came up to their height, and yet she could bring him down to his knees with but a look, a pout of her lips, a sideways grin, an all too familiar smirk.

And god forbid she began to cry for any which reason, like children were prone to doing at times, she was hard pressed to not remind him.

A single tear that stained her cherubic cheek was enough to wreck him and the next instant he would be groveling no end to a god he didn't even believe in to make it all better.

In happier times, she'd teased him regarding the nature of comeuppance, reminding him that it was only natural that someone who had spent so long surviving on the strength of his charms would one day find themselves a hopeless slave to the admittedly charismatic persuasions of another.

He'd laughed and told her this was one position of disadvantage he would willingly suffer till the end of time.

She can't even remember anymore what his laughter sounded like.

Because that particular sound seems as lost to her as their daughter was.

Like the different people they were, they loved differently… they always had.

Her affection like currents had always run deep and still, not all that visible at the surface but powerful enough to move oceans.

His love manifested in waves, explicit, strong and volatile, the kind that enveloped you with its unstoppable force and washed over you.

And in that pull and push…they had loved their child differently but equally.

And then grieved her loss differently but equally.

For the first time in all the years she knew him, she saw him unravel, saw him lose his sense of gravity, saw him become haunted.

Saw him nearly lose his mind with guilt and desperation.

And as much as she wanted to help, as much as she wanted to be the one to give him some grounding again, she couldn't.

Not when she was so inconsolable herself, lost in her own sorrow to be able to provide him any respite from his.

A selfish part of her needed him to be okay, to be able to pick up the pieces and put her back together.

To give her the support she had never been good at asking for and he had been good at offering without needing to be asked.

But he wasn't okay, far from it. He was spiraling and she couldn't pull him back from the deep end he was wandering dangerously towards. Couldn't tether him to what little was left of their family, of their life, of each other.

And every failed attempt, every dead end, every promising lead that never panned out in the search for their little girl took him farther and farther away from her.

Like a rudderless boat at sea, they had lost sight of their magnetic north and they simply drifted apart aimlessly in the abyss.

She'd seen the million times hope rose and died in his eyes every time he caught sight of a little blond head in the crowds and ran after futilely, calling out their daughter's name.

Seen the frantic ways in which he kicked at every door he could think off, called in every favor he had garnered, pleaded, coaxed, bargained, threatened.

Begged…

Grasping at straws like clawing at hard and unyielding earth, digging for what he had lost, till his fingers bled out.

And the ways in which it splintered his soul and fractured his spirit and broke him little by little, taking away everything she had loved so much about him.

And through it all, she watched day in and out and as they strived to find her, unable to reach out and help him, heal him, terrorized as she was by her own demons, confronted with the agonizing knowledge that the odds were against them.

Everything her job had prepared her for now only served to tyrannize her, the statistics about missing children, the sickening and horrible possibilities of what could have happened to her daughter.

The chances of getting her back.

It didn't help how starved for resources they had become in those few weeks. Their line of work, their vast experience in dealing with everything in the range of possible and impossible…everything rendered meaningless when their badges which once carried an overriding authority could no longer open doors for them, give them access to information, to clues…

In a split second, the world had turned against them, they went from being soldiers to renegades, their allies dwindled as their enemies grew exponentially.

It was not that she was stronger than him, she really wasn't, not when this was concerned.

Her veneer was just slightly thicker than his, hardened by more experience of loss than him than any superhuman ability to withstand it as such.

So she diverted her weakened energies to straightening the burgeoning chaos around them, found something that maybe she could fix, thinking naively that if she saved the world, then she would no doubt save him too.

After all history was proof that there was a higher than normal correlation between those two happenings.

In vain she tried to dissuade him from his self-destructive quest even if just temporarily, to convince him to come with her, so that they could do this, like they had done everything else in life…together.

Instill him in a sense of meaning just so that she could keep him from falling apart anymore.

But for once, she couldn't reach through to him. He was already long gone, removed from the realities around them, consumed by that need which was burning him up from the inside.

Irrationally and unfairly, she had wanted him to, wanted him to be her rock again, to be that devil may care man she had come to love who could brave a hurricane and come out of it unperturbed, with a smile on his face and quip on his tongue.

But she knew better than anyone how incapable he was of giving her what she needed; clinging stubbornly as he was to the only vestiges of hope he had left.

Her frustrations conflicted with his own, causing a friction that was chafing at their already bruised and battered defenses, drawing blood from their scathed and wounded cores. And then leaving them to bleed some more.

In that moment, in a wordless exchange, she saw the inevitable truth in his eyes just as he saw it in hers.

He had chosen her every single time in the past, over a rightful place in his own universe, over a better version of herself, over a future in which she would die at the hands of his father, over his own existence.

But he wouldn't choose her over their daughter.

She couldn't ask him to…It wasn't a choice any person should be forced to make.

And as she had walked towards Grand Central, made her way through Manhattan's infamous crowds now a lot thinner and more subdued since the takeover, feeling truly alone for the first time in years, she couldn't help thinking that she'd lost him forever. That she would never see him again.

She knew of course that they weren't done because how they could be. Stories like theirs never really ended.

There was just not anything left right then, in that moment.

If death were to have come to her then, she would have welcomed it with open arms, confident in the knowledge that he wouldn't give up looking, that one day he would find their child and keep her safe, protect her and make sure no harm came to her, be the exceptional father that he had always been.

She remembers the way he had looked at her that day, as he'd held their baby, all of two minutes after she had arrived in this world kicking and screaming and making her presence felt. Of course she had calmed down the second she was deposited into his arms.

He had bent down to meet her gaze, his expression caught between laughing and crying, wonderstruck and dazed, as he pressed fervent half-formed kisses on her lips.

_Thank you…_ he had whispered in a choked voice over and over, his tone embodying immeasurable gratitude.

_No…thank you_. She should have said to him, she thought as she triggered the amber device.


End file.
